Happy 3rd Birthday, Doodlebug! On this day, September 16, 2004 — you came into our lives, turned us upside down, shook us up a bit, and we still haven’t recovered…
…but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Love,
Mumma & Daddy
Hello, I am Dawn, and I will be your tour guide today here at The Dana Files.
In the last six months I started a blog because she made me, I have had one of these, was rocked by how I felt about it, and moved cross country with my husband to a place where we knew NO. ONE.
My blog started out private, and then I decided to throw caution to the wind and join the public world of blogging. I have been going through a bit of an identity crisis, so forgive me as I use y’all as the sounding board for my identity crisis cure.
(I so can’t believe Dana trusted me with actual responsibility. Joey Lawrence style “Whoa!”)
There are so. many. blogs. out there. I have hundreds in my reader. Hundreds. What I’ve learned is that most blend together into some kind of Queen of Suburban Wanna Lose Weight Soccer Mom-dom blur. We all have a lot in common. Which is A-Ok. We share common stories, and this motherhood thing is pretty universal.
Being the same can suck if there is a goal of creating a reader base, if the refresh button keeps getting hit on Feedburner to see what the reach is, if there are ads that only make money when they are viewed or clicked on. Then, blending in a big ole blur? … possibly not what we want.
From what I can tell, we are blogging for any or all of three reasons:
1) Community - because seriously, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want our MILs advice on … and we can always use more people to listen to our MIL stories…. which takes me to
2) Entertainment - we like to entertain people through our writing, and in return we get a charge out of people commenting and entertaining us back, cheap entertainment, which is good considering we need
3) Revenue - ads, or pay per post or reviews, if there is money to be made, then we want to be pocketing some of it ourselves.
Of all the blogs I read, I can think of one that stands out as unique from any other. Take a guess which one I’m thinking of and then click here to see if you read my mind.
Now, of course she’s living 20 miles from anywhere on a ranch with her hawt husband. So, she’s different from the start. Then there’s the photos, the contests, the cooking, the Ethel Merman, the 4 homeschooled ranch punks, the burps, and the totally self deprecating sense of humor. THEN, she’s even apparently really freaking NICE, AND shows a total interest in her readers. AND she answers email. (I sent her email one time b/c I realized I was looking at her cow photos while I was pumping for the baby, I thought that was really funny, so I wrote and told her so. She replied. I felt like I’d been noticed by a celebrity.) The three words I would use as a description of PW are: photos, ranch, punks. When I think of her site, I have a picture in my mind immediately of what that site is about (fortunately the calf nuts and preg testing don’t stay in my mind too long - effective mental floss I have.)
No pun intended, but what has happened with PW is called branding. You know what you are getting with her, and she rarely strays from the central theme of her blog. Lucky for her, it’s unique so it does make her more memorable. However, she’s just so damn cute and lovable that I think she could write out her grocery list and I would be entertained. I’m not alone.
Branding. This is what I’ve been mulling in my own mind. Mostly because I really want new banner swag for my site, and I think I should have a vision of just what my site is about before I spend any more money, and before I get a shiny new piece of bling that is supposed to represent my site. I also think that if I want people to read my site, that I should consistently give readers something of value. This is my lamest, most pointless post, ever. I mean, seriously, yawn. I might as well have listed how many diapers I changed that day.
I’d love it if when people saw kaiseralex.com, that there was an immediate connection to exactly which blog that was, which voice, which stories, which cast of crazy ass characters. My first step to this is to figure out just who I am. (Did I just channel Dr. Phil?)
I am:
The Mom (After all, the blog is titled Alex Year One. I can’t really ignore the Mom part of things. Unless he’s actually sleeping. Or the gypsies finally answer my phone calls.)
Retro-Progressive (This sounds way cooler than I actually am, but after I titled what I was doing Gen X Grandma Values, I found this term and figured I’d try it on for size.)
Appreciative (I love people total strangers taking time out of their life to read what I write. That’s a large Keanu Reeves style “whoa” for me. I also appreciate that people continually put themselves out there, busting their butts or their balls or their boobs to survive this parenthood thing. That people are trying to make something a little better than it was before. I’m trying to give props where deserved, and support where needed. We’re all looking for friendly faces, I’m trying to be that. Frankly, I also need the good karma points, because I keep flipping people off in traffic, and I’m pretty sure Alex’s first word will be f@ck.)
If I use this these three ideas to guide what I write about, it should save us all from me posting something that belongs in a diaper.
That’s me, who are you? I’d love to get to know you.
Chris and I have a general theory when it comes to responding to Kaitlyn crying at night-if it sounds like one of those “I’ve woken up and now I think it’s daytime so come get me out of this crib” cries, we wait it out. We believe children should learn to put themselves back to sleep when they wake up, with one exception: if the cries escalate to what sounds like genuine distress, one of us will go in. She is very tuned in to her diaper situation, and when she’s wet, she wants to be changed immediately. As opposed to our boys, who woke up every morning wearing Pull-Ups that weighed about five pounds. I know, ewww.
So this morning around 1:30 a.m., I’m sitting here on the couch blogging (what?), and I hear a faint cry. There’s no real urgency to it, so I listen and wait, and then she goes back to sleep. I shut everything down and go to bed, making sure the baby monitor was on just in case. I wake up at 6:30, get Ryan off to school, get Nathan up, and then about 7:20, Kaitlyn wakes up in her usual way, by hollering “Maaamaaaa. MAHmaaaa.” Nathan says “I’ll get her”, opens her bedroom door, and then staggers backward from the door.
Kaitlyn had, sometime in the night or early morning, possibly during that 1:30 a.m. mommy call, thrown up in her crib. And then presumably, passed out in it. Oh. My. GOD. It was all over the blankets, the stuffed animals, her hair…I feel HORRIBLE! That poor baby, having to sleep in that STINK.
So tell me, what is the answer here? Do I get up and go in her room every time I hear her make a noise, on the off chance it might be puke? Because then, you know what’s going to happen-she’s going to figure out that noise=Mom comes in, so she’ll do it all the time and stop sleeping all night! At almost two years old, she doesn’t need a bottle in the middle of the night anymore, so getting her up means she thinks it’s time to PLAY and READ and WATCH DORA (”Boots!”). But then, if I don’t go in, what if she has puked? And by the way, she isn’t sick, so I wasn’t anticipating puke, or I would have been on high Sick Kid Alert. GAH! Help me, Parentopia!
posted by elizabeth from Table for Five
